Boom Times in Bali

The island of Bali was once a palmstrewn
paradise where visitors came
for sun, surf and the charms of a
unique culture. Now foreign money
is pouring in, jackhammers split
the air and traffic jams are
part of the landscape. Jamie
James looks at the fallout.

When I moved from Manhattan to Bali in
1999, tourism was long established in the
beach resorts of Kuta and Sanur and the
gorges surrounding the village of Ubud. But
most of the island was still recognizably the
tropical arcadia of travel brochures – where
gentle rice farmers devoted themselves to the
glamorous rituals of their unique religion.

Yet soon after the turn of the new millennium an
astonishing, tourism-driven building boom
began, which shows no sign of abating. A
decade ago the island’s arid southern peninsula
of the Bukit was virtually uninhabited outside
the government-sponsored tourist enclave of
Nusa Dua. Now it is chock-a-block with luxury
hotels. North of Kuta, in Seminyak and along
the west coast, ancient rice fields have been
paved with holiday villas, thousands of them –
and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they
all look just the same.

Life’s a beach – for
the tourists. Some
locals are benefiting
from the boom – but
at what price?

Murdani Usman / Reuters

That isn’t quite fair. Some of the new houses
are fine works of architecture fitted out in
exquisite taste; but most of them are built on
the cheap for quick sale, spreading across the
hillsides like a burgeoning fungus. The sheer
volume of building over the past eight years
has created an aesthetic crisis as the natural
beauty of the island is immolated in the mad
dash for foreign dollars. Supply now far exceeds
demand. In 2010 the Indonesian Ministry of
Culture and Tourism estimated that Bali was
oversupplied with tourist accommodations by
9,800 rooms; in 2011 something like 10,000
more rooms opened their doors to visitors.
The provincial government has declared a
moratorium on hotel-building, in a classic case
of shutting the barn door after the horses have
bolted and the grooms have run off with the
tack and saddles.

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Fortunes are being made, no doubt about
that. Land values in prime tourism areas
continue to soar. In 2004 my partner and I
signed a 20-year lease on a restaurant on Jalan
Petitenget (Petitenget Street) in Seminyak.
In those days it was a quiet area with a few
budget resorts and tourist restaurants here and
there amid the rice fields and cow pastures.
If 10 cars drove by in an hour it was a busy
day. Eight years later in peak season the road
is jammed day and night, slowed to a crawl by
the lumbering behemoths of concrete mixers
and tourist coaches. Today, we could sell our
restaurant for 15 times our initial investment,
but we have no intention of doing so while the
punters pack the place out night after night.

Urbanization

I resist writing about the Bali boom as it’s
an invitation to hypocrisy. I live in a glass
bungalow. Everyone here complains incessantly
about the disastrous effects but most of us
make our livelihoods from it. Yet the dangers
are real, starting with the environmental impact of unrestricted building. Bali’s freshwater
supply is steadily declining in the face of
increasing demand. Environmentalists say
that accelerating saltwater encroachment in
tourist areas will soon present the threat of
subsidence, resulting in sinkholes that could
literally swallow up some of the new businesses.
Yet here, as in most places, the dire predictions
of environmentalists receive scant attention so
long as the boom continues to generate big
profits for investors.

Infrastructure likewise gives cause for
concern. The electrical supply was inadequate
when I arrived 14 years ago and the problem
has grown gravely worse. Blackouts, both
planned and unplanned, are frequent. The
volume of traffic on the streets far exceeds the
capacity of the roadways, which were built long
before the emergence of a rising middle class
(or what passes for such in Indonesia) to whom
a car or a motorcycle is the principal status
symbol.

Ancient rice fields have been paved
with holiday villas, thousands of them
– and they all look just the same

The buzz word here is ‘urbanization’.
American novelist Diana Darling, a Bali
resident for 30 years, wrote an essay for a local
magazine describing the phenomenon: ‘All the
marketing talk is about “tranquillity” and “lush
tropical vegetation” and “ancient rituals”. But
Bali is on its way to becoming a city without
even trying: the urbanization of Bali is under way and nobody seems to be in charge.’
Urbanization may even be too benign a term,
for that implies the delivery of some services to
residents; but here everything is being done for
the visitors. The concept of a park is as puzzling
to the Balinese as the preservation of farmland
would be in London.

Meanwhile, on Jalan Petitenget, I cope with
the traffic by riding my push-bike; our water
comes from a well in the garden. One thing I
have learned from living in Indonesia is that
life carries on perfectly well without electricity.
Yet there’s no escaping the disruptive effects
of the new economy on the social fabric. The
boom has created thousands of service jobs,
but soaring land values have put the cost of
housing out of reach for most workers. The
cheap boarding-houses that were once common
are being torn down and replaced by yet more
hotels, more villas, more tourist restaurants
and chic little shops. My employees must move
farther and farther away, adding yet more to
the volume of traffic.

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When I moved to my house on Jalan
Petitenget, my bedroom window faced a rice
field, with a fine view of the volcanoes in the north. Last year, the rice field gave way to a
24-hour mini-market that blocks the view of
the mountains. Late at night, when their shifts
end, the young employees of the new hotels and
restaurants on Petitenget meet in the market’s
car park to relax over beers before their long
ride home. They make a racket, playing music
and howling with laughter, but it’s hard to
condemn them. They have nowhere else to go.

Lost ownership

My friend Odeck Ariawan, a restaurateur whose
family has been prominent in Ubud for many
generations, observes the transformation of his
island: ‘At least 70 per cent of the investment in
Bali comes from outside – some say 85 per cent.
Yet it’s the Balinese who will pay the price for
the problems and the social effects.’ He points
out that money-laundering is one factor in the
steep rise of land values, with many investments
made in cash. From time to time at the bank
I see people withdrawing bricks of banknotes,
hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stuffed
in a cardboard box. What are they buying?

Odeck asks a challenging question: ‘If the
Balinese are losing ownership of the land, and
with so many outsiders coming in, can we still
call it Bali?’

Evidence of
thuggery is
commonplace,
but tourists
are completely
unaware of the
phenomenon

The influx is coming not only from investors
and tourists but also from within Indonesia.
Most of the workers doing the building here
are poor migrants from east Java who live in
jerrybuilt deal shanties on the construction
sites. After dark, when their workday ends,
they stroll in quiet groups toward the few
remaining marketplaces that cater to them,
miles away, to spend their wages ($3-$7 a day)
on noodles, fried dough and cheroots – they
can’t afford real food or real cigarettes. These
meek, exhausted young men and adolescent
boys are all but invisible to the tourists dressed
in spotless white linen who pass them on the footpath, headed for cocktails and a threecourse
dinner at one of the fashionable new
watering-holes.

As so often occurs, clashes between the
different clans of the dispossessed are on the
rise. Genteel anti-Javanese prejudice is common
among the Balinese at every social stratum
and, among the young, resentment sometimes
turns violent. At one restaurant in Seminyak,
directly opposite the most lavish new resort
in the neighbourhood, a Javanese night guard
who caught a gang of local lads stealing orchids
from the garden was beaten so severely that he
required reconstructive surgery. Such anecdotal
evidence of thuggery is commonplace,
but tourists are completely unaware of the
phenomenon. Foreign visitors in Indonesia are
treated with the utmost politesse.

Tee time in Bali: a
tourist plays golf from a
tee surrounded by paddy
fields. Farmland is being
sacrificed to make way for
development – leading to
soaring food prices.

Murdani Usman / Reuters

As I said, I try to resist writing about the
changes in Bali: I’m too deeply complicit. I
want you to visit us; everyone should come to
Bali at least once. It never was a paradise. That
was the dream of naïve early visitors which was
then appropriated by the cynical marketers who
came after them. If you let yourself be put off
by traffic jams and irregular rubbish collection,
you cut yourself off from most of the world east
of Istanbul.

Diana Darling writes: ‘The wish to
conserve Bali is something like the wish to
stay young.’ The standard line around here has
long been that traditional Balinese culture is
indestructible, and there’s as much truth in it
as there ever is in wishful thinking. The values
of the Balinese themselves are under attack by
the forces that are transforming most places in
our world – the relentless cycle of getting and
spending in a global economy.

Jamie James’ most recent book is Rimbaud in Java: the Lost
Voyage (Editions Didier Millet, Singapore). He and his partner
own and operate Waroeng Bonita in Seminyak, Bali.